The clock strikes midnight. Darkness embraces our lives with his gentle touch and invites us to welcome a new day, shaking off the memory of 24 hours only just passed. Enveloped in this charming atmosphere, dominated by tints of dark blue night colour, our being assumes dreamlike forms. And so we find ourselves suddenly meditating on our aspirations, on our failures, groping for a guide line, seeking a light, clinging to a life-line, a hope…

Therefore it is not by chance that the paintings presented in Alessandro's second personal exhibition seem familiar and particularly close to our sensibility. The dreamlike aspect of the Como painter's style is not an explicit genuflection to surrealism, but rather the artist captures the moment by observing daily reality and understanding the psychology of contemporary man, more than ever mentally engaged in the exhausting pursuit of artificial paradise.

In fact Alessandro places the protagonists of his works in scenarios familiar to the eyes of the western spectator. By carefully observing his landscapes, almost ghostly and often disquieting, the more astute observer will gradually discern some frames of cinematic masterpieces freely interpreted by the artist. These backgrounds are inhabited by silent and solitary heroes, immersed in blue painted on blue, appearing at the same time serene and disturbing, relaxed and oppressive. Faces and features very dear to the painter are chosen as symbols of contemporary humanity, clueless interpreters of the theatre of the absurd, packed off to a stage trodden every day by all of us.

The restlessness is tangible in Alessandro's works, as if it were a thin and moist blanket of fog enveloping our awareness. This sensation is emphasized by the acute optical illusions by which the artist deforms perspective, thereby corrupting the visual objectivity of the viewer, through lines of force in reference to Munch's work. Through this process of reduction and abstraction, has no intention of controlling or, even worse, dominating reality. To the contrary, his works show rebellion, fleeing from every attempt of human rationalization, exploding in a blooming vegetable and Art Nouveau crescendo, in clear contracts with the hyper-real silence of the painter's origins.

Well, the works of Alessandro Filardo must surely induce us to search inside ourselves for the same light which shines from within his portraits, whether it be the first rays of dawn that awaken our hopes for a new day, or the soft and warm glow of the following sunset………